The Great Kat: Beethoven's Guitar Shred

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All Rise...

Judge Adam Arseneau quits. No, seriously...he quits.

The Charge

WHAT the WHAT?!

The Case

This DVD is the herald of my destruction and demise. After seven years in
judges robes, watching Beethoven's Guitar Shred was like looking into a
future where the sins of every bad review and every snarky comment come back to
eviscerate me and torture me endlessly in the afterlife. This is my penance,
reviewing this…this…thing.

The Great Kat is a woman who holds a guitar and then proceeds to murder it
with her hands, with blood pouring out of her orifices. A prolific metal
virtuoso and guitar shredder, Beethoven's Guitar Shred is a music video
compilation of short, frenzied bursts of apocalyptic noise and chaos, set
vaguely to the march of classical composers:

Filmed on what appears to be a S&M dungeon, punctuated by green screen
shots of lightning bolts, flaming seas and bloodstained crosses, The Great Kat
bangs out freakishly fast metal riffs while drenched in blood and bondage gear,
surrounded by religious iconography on fire, demons, and people being brutally
tortured. Each video lasts about 30 seconds, which is a technical testament to
her prodigious shredding talent. Either that, or sheer mercy, because watching
any more of this would make your brain shut down.

I can't even begin to wrap my head around this conceptual nightmare. From a
guitar technical perspective, Kat has skills. Playing "The Flight of the
Bumble-Bee" at Mach 4 on a guitar is no small feat. But the screaming, the
blood and fire and leather and bondage gear and people up in the dungeon? The
demonic imagery set to classical music, the weird low-budget pornography
production values, the letterboxed transfer, the blood? It's like watching a
Dario Argento film sped up three times fast, or that video they make Alex watch
in A Clockwork Orange.

The technical specs: eight minutes of full-frame video and horrendous audio,
not counting the three minutes of bonus featurettes. You read that
correctly.

You know what? No. Just no. This isn't fit for human consumption. This is
like an Internet meme gone horribly awry. But it's deadly serious. This is an
actual retail product for sale, and people actually will be purchasing it. I
shudder in fear.